Ceramic Coatings
I don’t do ceramic coatings. You may think this an odd way to start a blog about ceramic coatings? Let me explain. I regularly get asked questions and approached for advice on ceramic coatings. The intention of this blog is to answer those questions and hopefully help you to make the right decision. Ceramic coatings have become increasingly popular over the years and are often something I am asked about. So what is a ceramic coating? Well we could go into huge technical detail about the products, chemical properties and characteristics but that’s no use to the customer who just wants a plain English answer to “What is it and do I need one?” What is a ceramic coating A ceramic coating is what is known as an LSP (last stage protection). That means the final product a detailer will put on your paintwork. The layer that provides protection to the paint. If it helps, think of it like a traditional car wax but one that is much longer lasting. One that actually creates a glass hard layer on top of the paint that resists scratches and swirls. A ceramic coating may have a life expectancy of 1 year or more and some products claim up to 9 years. Some of the best products fall into the 3-7yr range. So do you need one? There are a few things to consider here before you take the plunge. They don’t come cheap (see more below) and you need to decide if the outlay is a worthwhile investment? How long do you normally keep your car? If you buy a car and run it into the ground then a long lasting coating could be right for you. If you swap out every couple of years why pay for a 5yr coating? Then again if you sell/return your car at 3yrs and the paintwork is immaculate it may increase your selling price. That said, considering the state of paint on many cars your purchaser may not care or even notice. Do you lease/rent/PCP the car? In other words is it going back? Again, it may enhance the value when you return it or at least reduce the risk of penalty charges… but it may not either. So whether you need one is influenced by a number of factors and you should seek appropriate advice from a number of detailers before committing to a package. Get a feel for who you can trust and what they tell you about the coatings, the pre-preparation, how long it’s likely to take and the cost. Once you have done this research you are in a much better place to make an informed decision on what you want done or deciding not to have one at all. What is the process to have a ceramic coating applied to my car? All detailers do things slightly differently. Not all ceramic coatings are the same and many require product specific installation. That said the basic process is to wash, clean and fully decontaminate the car. A good 2 or 3 stage wash process should generally be followed by iron fallout remover and tar/glue removal. The latter are the sticky black blobs on your car thrown up from the road. These post wash processes are called ‘chemical decontamination’. Essentially using chemicals to remove contamination from the paint surface. Despite this process there is still likely to be even more residue on the paint and at this point a detailer should move to using a clay bar or clay mitt to clay all the panels. This is called ‘mechanical decontamination’. A soft clay specifically for car paint is lightly worked across all the panels to remove any other contamination from the paint including things like tree sap that the chemical process has not removed. The car then needs to be dried. Why go through all this decontamination? Firstly. If the car is to be machine polished then not doing so runs the risk of the polishing pad picking up this debris and actually inducing more scratches into the paint. Secondly, if not done, you are embedding this debris, which should not be there, into your ceramic coating. Look at any car in bright sunlight. There is a good chance you will see lots and lots of light circular scratches on the paint. Often called ‘swirl marks’ or ‘micro scratches’ these significantly affect the depth, colour and gloss of the paint. Some ceramic coatings ‘may’ help in reducing the appearance of these scratches*. However, if you are proud of your car and want it to look the best then these need removing. This involves machine polishing all the panels on the car. There is no need to have this done but if this stage is omitted you are simply burying all those scratches and swirls underneath a rock hard ceramic coating. They ‘may’ be minimised by the coating but they won’t be gone and more likely will be immortalised on your paintwork until the ceramic coating eventually fails. Your car ends up having great water behaviour but still looks a mess! Machine polishing a car is not simply a case of running a machine polisher over the car as fast as can be done and ‘hey presto’. I will cover machine polishing in more detail in another blog. However, if it is done correctly, it is not a fast process, needs a number of machines, a variety of polishing pad sizes, a selection of polishes and time. Sometimes, the ‘enhancement’ of the paint can be completed with just one pass. This means the panel is polished once with a fine polish and the result is good enough. At other times it may need two or even three stages. Detailers often refer to this as a ‘two stage’ or ‘three stage’ paint correction. Essentially they use a coarse polish to start off with to remove deeper scratches but then need to refine that afterwards with a much finer polish to bring back the